Counterintuitive outcomes of technology

“Children encounter technology constantly at home and in school. Television, DVDs, video games, theInternet, and smart phones all play a formative role in children’s development. The term ‘technology’ subsumes a large variety of somewhat independent items, and it is no surprise that current research indicates causes for both optimism and concern depending upon the content of the technology, the context in which the technology immerses the user, and the user’s developmental stage. Furthermore, because the field is still in its infancy, results can be surprising: video games designed to be reasonably mindless result in widespread enhancements of various abilities, acting, we will argue, as exemplary learning tools. Counterintuitive outcomes like these, besides being practically relevant, challenge and eventually lead to refinement of theories concerning fundamental principles of brain plasticity and learning.”

Responses

”The idea of modeling human mind by a formal system is presented by Tur-
ing in his 1950 paper ”Computing machinery and intelligence” [78]; Turing’s
argument in favour of the existence of such a model remains unchallenged.
Yet, there are possible several renditions of Turing’s idea depending on how
you understand the words ”formal system” and ”intelligence”. The two sources
nearest to what we attempt to achieve are Alexandre Borovik’s book on percep-
tion of mathematics by mathematically inclined children [9] and design of self
motivated learning robots pursued by Pierre-Yves Oudeyer’s team [70].

” We shall explain later on how the universal structure learning mechanism
accounts for the language acquisition along with chess (regarded as a dialog
between the players) and mathematics (where ergobrain plays with itself [9])
with agreement with the point of view currently accepted by many psychologists
and computer scientists [53].

” It may seem to a non-mathematician that only Buridan’s ass would have
any difficulty in choosing one of the two from . But mathematicians often
find this difficult. (See [9] for a mathematician’s study of amusing psychological
hurdles encountered by mathematics learners and practitioners.) This is not
that surprising: try to program a robot doing this, where the two are not
conveniently positioned on a line, you can not just command: ”take the left
one”.